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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

As Mozilla research engineering manager for VR/AR, Lars Bergstrom wrote:

We’re entering a new phase of work on JavaScript APIs here at Mozilla, that will help everyone create and share virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects on the open web.

The new WebXR Device API will provide the foundations to build augmented reality experiences in the browser by enabling the integration of the real-world with contextual overlays. For example, users could replace a Web page background with a skybox, that is a live image representing anything that is beyond immediate reach, such as the sky, a mountain, distant buildings, etc. Additionally, to allow users to navigate virtual spaces more naturally, WebXR will support different kinds of user inputs, including voice and gestures.

The WebXR community is working on draft specifications that target some of the constraints of today’s wireless devices. For instance, creating a skybox setting you can use to can change the background image of a web page. We’re also working on a way to expose the world-sensing capabilities of early AR platforms to the web, so developers can determine where surfaces are without needing to run complex computer vision code on a battery-powered device.

The current draft for WebXR covers light estimation, eye tracking, skyboxes, static 3D favicons, controller support, computer vision, and more. Web pages will be able to detect and query VR/AR capabilities, poll device orientation and position, and produce graphical frames at the required frame rate during an immersive AR session. Although the specification is not yet stable, Mozilla is planning to move forward based on its current state and then make all required adjustments as they become necessary.

To dig deeper into WebXR, do not miss the current specification draft and the WebXR Device API Explainer, which also includes a wealth of code snippets to carry through basic tasks such as querying device capabilities, opening an XR session, outputting graphical content, etc.